It’s been a long time since I composed the previous (anti-Obama) posts. And let me say that Obama has not only completely vindicated the scorn I previously expressed, he has gone way beyond my wildest fears. I need to say something about Obama that might strike you as incredible. It certainly strikes me as incredible. But…

OBAMA IS WORSE THAN GEORGE W. BUSH!

Let that statement sink in for a moment. Bush was the worst (as well as the most powerful) U.S. president in history up to that point in time. He murdered, in cold blood, hundreds of thousands of people and directly and indirectly helped impoverish perhaps millions more (including me). He lied so brazenly and so often that the only times you could safely say he was not lying were those rare, blessed moments when his mouth was shut.

Yet Obama has trumped him for sheer awfulness. Bush angrily tore the Constitution to pieces. Obama, the Constitutional scholar, has taken the pieces, shredded them and recycled them. His “Yes We Can” (originally, the left motto “Si se puede”) brand has now been re-worded as the motto of the cartoon villain Megamind: “No You Can’t.” As far as warmongering (he actually expanded our wars to include Pakistan and now Libya), destruction of civil liberties (particularly in Guantanamo, which he had once vowed to shut down), persecution of whistleblowers (his treatment of the as-yet untried Bradley Manning will live in infamy), sucking up to Wall Street and general nasty hypocrisy are concerned, he at least equals and even surpasses his appalling predecessor.

If I had to pick one incident that for me summarizes the Obama White House, it’s the Osama Death Photo Incident. After executing lynch mob justice on Osama bin Laden (and please, don’t give me that “Osama didn’t deserve a trial” crap: after WWII, the Allies tried HERMANN GOERING for Chrissake, and they would have tried Hitler himself if he had been captured alive), there was intense internal debate within the White House whether to release the pictures of the al-Qaeda “mastermind” with a bullet hole in his head.

This was a real dilemma for Obama: he could withhold the pictures and have part of the world say that his claim of having whacked Obama was a lie, or he could release them and risk driving Islamic fundamentalists violently berserk. He chose the former course purely out of cynical realpolitik, knowing that some people would challenge his proud claim of cold-blooded murder even if the photos were published for all the world to see.

But of course, Obama being Obama, he needs to recast this decision as High Idealism. In an upcoming 60 Minutes interview partially leaked to the press, Obama blandly pontificated:

It is very important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence — as a propaganda tool. That’s not who we are. You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. We don’t need to spike the football.

(Nixon loved football, too, and liked to speak in metaphors derived from that sport.)

As an activist Facebook friend of mine commented: “I see: it is not the shooting in the head, but the image of the bloody head that would constitute a problem.” And if brandishing your enemy’s head like a barbarian chieftain is “not what we’re about,” why was there such intense internal debate about the decision within the White House in the first place?

Idiots can chant “USA! USA!” outside the White House, but I think all sensitive and knowledgeable people should be sickened by this hypocrisy. (And don’t get me started on the illegal attempted hit on Gaddafi, which killed innocent children without so much as a whisper of an apology from the UN or the US.) But of course, that will not stop good Democrats from voting for Obama next year. Democratic politicians can act even more like gangsters than Republicans, but turning to a progressive third party like the Greens is “off the table” for these handwringing innocents.

Perhaps Geoffrey Robertson, one of Julian Assange’s defense lawyers, put it best, as quoted here: “Mr. Obama’s assertion that justice was done was ‘a total misuse of language,’ Mr. Robertson said. ‘This is the justice of the Red Queen: sentence first, trial later.'” Actually, Robertson is a tad confused: it was Louis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts, not The Red Queen, who said that. But on second thought, it sounds right: to be the Queen (or King) of Hearts, you first have to have one.

Giving Wall Street $800 Billion in taxpayer’s money — over $2000 for every man, woman and child in America — was supposed to free up credit markets and stabilize the economy, right? Yeah, right!

Perhaps the most shocking political episode in my lifetime has been the completely cynical and corrupt surrender of the Democratically-controlled Congress to the Wall Street speculators (aka, thieves), whose almost unbelievably reckless policies brought this gigantic mess upon us. And the punchline of this sick joke is that this criminal act of base thievery has not brought us economic security as advertised, but utter chaos. An entire country, Iceland, is on the verge of going under! From Britain to Australia, all is turmoil, confusion, FEAR. And everyone is saying or thinking: this can’t go on, the market’s going to bottom out soon… isn’t it?

I’m convinced that this has happened because the Left doesn’t exist in America as a political force. Progressive people meeting, talking, demonstrating, writing blogs (like this one)… all that means nothing. All the talk and good intentions of good people can be cancelled literally at the stroke of Bush’s pen, or at the whim of the utterly cynical Nancy Pelosi, whose only thought is not, “How can we public servants help the people?” but “How can we political hacks avoid damage and gain power?” The only reason the bailout took a week to get through Congress was because of the resistance of wingnut Ayn Rand Republicans! The Democratic leadership were completely okay with giving away the people’s money to their buddies in the financial services industry. The Party that refused to impeach the sociopath George Bush and the truly evil Dick Cheney, ostensibly on the grounds that they were lame ducks and couldn’t do any more harm, have now allowed those two criminals to start one last war: the war against the American taxpayer!

Have Bush/Pelosi gone too far? Will the American people stand for this? I was coming home on the subway tonight and all I saw around me were people napping, reading bad newspapers, nodding out… oblivious. Yet the events of the past few weeks might ultimately cause more misery — more starvation, more homelessness, more hopelessness — than America has seen since the Great Depression.

Who wins the election almost doesn’t matter. (Yes, McCain/Palin might attack Iran, and that does matter.) President Obama is not going to pull us out of this mess. (Somebody has rightly written that, if Barack wins, his new slogan might well be, “No, we can’t,” as in “no, we can’t have any more social services because there’s no more money.”) President McCain definitely won’t pull us out of it. Only We the People can pull us out of this.

If Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party gets 5% of the national vote, that would at least be a beginning, because it would raise the Greens to major party status and give Progressives a voice in government. But whether McKinney succeeds or not, it’s up to the people to get mad and fight back, by doing direct action, by organizing strikes, by never letting our lying, traitorous “representatives” off the hook. As Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young once sang, “We’re finally on our own.”

We all know the old dance: it’s a very ancient and corrupt American custom. In an election year, two candidates of the same mainstream party bitterly contest the primaries. Each tries to make the case that to vote for the other guy or gal would be tantamount to destroying the country. To attain the Holy Grail of the party’s nomination, each candidate puts her/his opponent through a process seemingly designed not only to make him or her lose, but to sully that candidate’s professional and personal reputation beyond repair. And when the dust settles and one candidate emerges victorious, the defeated candidate suddenly forgets that the opponent is Evil Incarnate and for the sake of something called Party Unity casts aside all pretense of consistency, integrity and self-respect, shifting the axis of evil to the standard bearer of the other political party and embracing the new nominee and former enemy as a long lost buddy, with whom he/she has never had any ideological differences worth talking about (this last part, sadly, is almost always true).

But one major party candidate this year refused to perform this insane dance. Texas Congressman Ron Paul fought hard against John McCain during the Republican primaries, disagreed with him on practically every issue, and was ultimately buried by the McCain juggernaut. But he refused to play the game. He was much too principled, too committed to his core beliefs — of which McCain is the very antithesis — to compromise. So when the call came from his fellow Texan, Phil Gramm (by the way, isn’t Gramm not supposed to be working for the McCain campaign anymore?), with the message, “You need to endorse John McCain,” Ron Paul politely but firmly said No.

As the good doctor later described it, the demand was not quite as bullying as it may sound. Knowing well his colleague’s stubbornness, Gramm tried to make the argument in terms of his, Paul’s, self-interest. McCain, Gramm claimed, was going to cut taxes more than Obama, so logically the Republican candidate would do “less harm” than the Democratic one. But the congressman knew that to cave in now to GOP pressure would be to betray everything he’d worked and voted for in his career. Besides, as he would later remark, “I don’t like the idea of getting two or three million people angry at me.” The decision was not a difficult one.

But his next decision may well have been. Instead of fading into the night as the glare of the media spotlight moved on to McBama, Dr. Paul chose to be a beacon of true democracy. No longer a candidate himself, Paul called a press conference at the National Press Club on September 10th to bring attention to third-party candidates and thus shine a light not only on all the crucial issues that the two frontrunners refuse to tackle, but on the extent to which our democracy itself has been snuffed out by the single corporate party with two heads and its media lapdogs.

He invited to the press conference Independent candidate Ralph Nader, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, Libertarian candidate Bob Barr (who for reasons of his own declined to appear) and my own candidate, Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. Amazingly, the three politicians who showed up and Dr. Paul — despite their numerous and strong ideological differences — agreed on a four-point statement of principles, opposing:

A foreign policy that commits the US to disastrous foreign wars like the one in Iraq, which destroys lives and depletes our treasury;

The erosion of our constitutionally-protected civil liberties, including the Patriot Act, the approval of torture and the FISA bill;

The runaway growth of the national debt, which creates an intolerable burden for future generations; and

Corporate bailouts and the untrammeled power of the Federal Reserve system.

Dr. Paul in his presentation was gracious, modest, eminently reasonable. He deplored the “lesser of two evils” psychology which leads citizens to vote for people of whom they do not approve. He urged people not to waste their vote on politicians and policies in which they don’t believe. He also deplored the mainstream media and its obsession with “lipstickgate” and other nonsensical “issues.”

Then the candidates each got up to speak. Though they are united in their conviction that the system must be changed, each presented a different point-of-view. My candidate, Cynthia McKinney, reminded people of the Four Pillars of the Green Party: Peace, Social Justice, Ecological Wisdom and Grassroots Democracy. She remarked that when she left the Democratic Party, she “declared [her] independence” from an unjust system, a “politics of conformity and control.” She added that we engage in politics “so we can have power over public policy.” Politics is, after all, the “authoritative allocation of values in a society,” and that only a tiny minority of Americans now have their values affirmed in this society, wheras most of us have our values affirmed “practically none of the time.” She urged voters to “declare [their] independence” from the current system.

It must be said in truth that I disagree, and in some cases strongly disagree, with some of Ron Paul’s views. But I cannot help but admire his patriotism and integrity, as well as a virtue almost unheard of in politicians today: courage. Thank you, Dr. Paul!

In Andover, Massachusetts on the weekend of September 13-14, there will be a conference exploring means to obtain prosecutions of Bush and high-level members of his administration for war crimes. It is being organized by Lawrence Velvel, the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law. Though not the first such event (the World Tribunal on Iraq, a worldwide series of tribunals which explored the legal culpability of Bush and Blair for their actions before, during and after the invasion, held a session in New York City in May, 2004), the conference is a step in the direction of holding the Bushies legally accountable for their crimes.

A two-day conference on obtaining prosecutions of high level American war criminals will open September 13th, in Andover, Mass. The conference will explore the legal grounds for, and plan for, obtaining prosecutions of President Bush and top officials of his Administration for war crimes.

In the tradition of America’s Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials after World War II, Justice Robert Jackson, the Conference’s purpose is “to hold high U.S. officials accountable in courts of law and, if guilt is found, to obtain appropriate punishments. Otherwise,” said the Conference’s convener, Lawrence Velvel, “the future will be threatened by additional examples of Executive lawlessness by leaders who need fear no personal consequences” for their actions, leading to “the possibility of more Viet Nams, more Iraqs, and more repression.”

Velvel emphasized, “This is intended to be a planning conference, one at which plans will be laid, and necessary organizational structures will be set up, to seek prosecutions to determine guilt and, if guilt is found, appropriate punishments.”

Attendees will hear from prominent authorities on international law, criminal prosecutions, and constitutional rights who are determined to give meaning to Justice Jackson’s words: “The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.”

Topics to be discussed, Velvel said, include:

What international and domestic crimes were committed, which facts show crimes under which laws, and what punishments are possible.

Which high level Executive officials — and Federal judges and legislators as well, if any — are chargeable with crimes.

Which international tribunals, foreign tribunals and domestic tribunals (if any) can be used and how to begin cases and/or obtain prosecutions before them.

The possibility of establishing a Chief Prosecutor’s Office such as the one at Nuremburg.

An examination of cases already brought and their outcomes.

Creating an umbrella Coordinating Committee with representatives from the increasing number of organizations involved in war crimes cases.

Creating a Center to keep track of and organize compilations of relevant briefs, articles, books, opinions, and facts, etc., on war crimes and prosecutions of war criminals.

Scheduled to address the Conference include:

Famed former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, author of the best-selling “The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder”(Vanguard).

Phillippe Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre of International Courts and Tribunals at University College, London . He is the author of “Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values” (Penguin/Palgrave Macmillan), among other works.

Jordan Paust, Professor of Law at the University of Houston and author of “Beyond The Law.”

Ann Wright, a former U.S. Army colonel and U.S. Foreign Service official who holds a State Department Award for Heroism and who taught the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare at the Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, N.C. She is the coauthor of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”

Peter Weiss, Vice President of the Center For Constitutional Rights, which was recently involved with war crimes complaints filed in Germany and France against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others.

Benjamin Davis, Associate Professor at the University of Toledo College of Law and former American Legal Counsel for the Secretariat of the International Court of Arbitration.

David Lindorff, journalist and co-author with Barbara Olshansky of “The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office”(St. Martin ’s Press).

Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, and the U.S. implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Lawrence Velvel, a leader in the field of law school education reform, has written numerous internet articles on issues relevant to the conference.

Legal authorities, media representatives, and the general public are invited to attend the conference. Attendees will receive a special hotel rate of $99 per night.

Andover is nearly equidistant from both Boston’s Logan Airport , served by all major airlines, and the Manchester , N.H. , Airport, served by Southwest Airlines and USAir.

In my last post, I pointed out that when teen pregnancy (or some other problematical social phenomenon) happens to others — particularly minorities — Republicans invariably consider it to be a moral plague, caused not by out-of-control hormones, but by out-of-their-minds liberals and their damnable liberal policies. However, when such a thing happens to one of their own — like Bristol Palin, the “Juno from Juneau” — then, of course, it becomes, using the same catchphrases of those same hated liberals, a “private matter” and “a family affair.” In this case, it may even be (glory hallelluia!) a cause for religious pride, due to the mother-to-be’s rejection of abortion and embrace of the venerable tradition of the shotgun wedding. (Never mind that, by any sane standard, neither Bristol nor her beau are anywhere near ready for Holy Matrimony.)

But let’s flip the script. Obama’s daughters are a tad too young to make Bristol’s mistake (they are about ten and seven, respectively). But what if they weren’t? I have a feeling that the Obama household keep a much tighter rein on their daughters than the Palins did. Yet these things occur in the best of families. So what would happen next?

The headlines would scream, “Obama’s daughter pregnant!” The news would sweep like wildfire through the blogosphere. Pundits would pontificate about this terrible blow to the campaign of the first black presidential nominee from a mainstream party, while hypocritically insisting that, of course, it shouldn’t matter. But of course it would matter, to white (and some black) voters of both parties. A pregnant Obama child would conjure up, in the imaginations of white people, images of countless black and Hispanic welfare mothers, parasitically draining the public treasury by their callous lack of self-control (though most welfare recipients, in fact, are white). Obama’s poll numbers would plummet approximately five times as fast as Bush’s did. McCain would publicly deplore the brouhaha, pretend to maintain focus on the “issues,” and swagger easily, smirking all the way, into the White House in January.

Why is this nightmare vision plausible? Because Americans, more even than most people around the world, tend to feel much more than they think — and feeling is essentially irrational. Symbol, myth and gesture, more than good sense — or even common sense — rule our politics.

Americans might well take caution from a famous historical case of emotional prejudice triumphing over reason, to the detriment of all. In 19th Century Ireland, the parliamentarian Charles Stewart Parnell, through his tremendous political gifts and sheer charisma, became tremendously effective, far more than any Irish politican before or since, in bringing England around to the idea of respecting the Irish — and giving them a bit of freedom into the bargain. He was smeared by numerous scandals, including one which linked his name (through forged letters) to the infamous Phoenix Park murders, in which terrorists murdered two officials in that famous park in Dublin. Parnell survived all these tribulations and became in fact what he was commonly called by all: “the uncrowned king of Ireland.”

Then a fellow Irish MP named Captain O’Shea divorced his wife, Katherine O’Shea — and had the tactlessness to name Parnell as correspondent. Parnell, he claimed, had been his wife’s lover for years. Many assumed (and no doubt hoped) that this was just another smear. Unfortunately for Ireland, it wasn’t: its “king” was an adulterer. It didn’t matter a jot that he and Mrs. O’Shea were not casual sex partners (like so many of his fellow MPs and their mistresses), but hopelessly, devotedly and passionately in love; nor that she had been separated from Captain O’Shea even before she met Parnell; nor that, after her divorce became final, he did the honorable thing and married the lady immediately. The church hierarchy were furious, scandalized! And so were many humble and pious Catholic citizens — even some who owed their livelihoods to Parnell’s reforms.

From king, Parnell descended to renegade. Former allies now became bitter enemies. Ill but undaunted, our hero fought to bring himself and his cause back into his countrymen’s good graces. At one campaign stop, an enemy threw quicklime in his face. Manfully, he continued to make speeches, a bandana covering his injured eye, looking for all the world like a pirate. At last his body gave out. He died of pneumonia, age 45, and his cause died with him. It has been claimed that almost all Ireland’s political troubles for the next hundred years or so were caused directly or indirectly from the tragedy of Parnell’s fall — because the Irish preferred their puritanical morality to freedom.

Obama is no Parnell, of course. He is not a visionary (despite his visionary rhetoric), but a very clever and skillful politician, promising change with a militarist program that makes true change impossible. You should definitely vote against him, but not for the wrong reasons, particularly reasons of race — the issue which, when mixed with sex, is the real third rail of American politics. Nor for that matter, should you vote against McCain/Palin just because the daughter of the latter is in the family way. You should vote against them for their smugness, their hypocrisy, their double standard, their lack of humanity. That leaves only the third parties. If you’re a right-wing guy/gal, you should look into Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party. And if you’re a left-wing guy/gal, check out either Ralph Nader, running on the Independent Party line, or Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. (Obviously, I’m biased toward the latter!)

Isn’t it ASTOUNDING how, as soon as the Republicans are themselves caught displaying the frailities and foibles — like drug addiction or sexual excess — that they constantly condemn in others, they suddenly become raving liberals?

Why Is This Girl Smiling?

Why should we care when an utterly unqualified Vice Presidential candidate suddenly and proudly presents us with her knocked-up teen daughter as an anti-abortion and pro-abstinence (!) role model?

Why Is *This* Girl Smiling?

The case for ignoring this whole mess is perhaps best put by Brian Alexander of MNSBC:

War in Iraq, economy imploding, energy transformation finally on America’s agenda, income disparity threatening the social order, cynicism infecting every corner of American life, a tectonic shift to a multi-polar world, a collapsing educational system, and you want to make the pregnancy of a 17-year-old a political issue?

Well… yes! Because the Republican Party — led by the fascist wing of Pat Buchanan and others like him — made, over the past two decades, their savage culture war on everyone private morality the defining aspect of contemporary politics, from Monica Lewinsky’s stained dress to Elliot Spitzer’s blazing crash and burn. Their cries of pseudo-moral outrage overwhelm the sustained and sober thought necessary for Americans to deal rationally with any of the problems enumerated above — or to realize that the Repugs themselves, least of all Sarah Palin, haven’t a clue about how to solve any of it.

The tragedy behind this farce is that there really is a qualified candidate for President who does have ideas about what to do about our problems, but because of a total media blackout, you may not even have heard of her. She is Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party and she is the perfect embodiment of the Ten Key Values the Greens espouse:

Grassroots Democracy

Social Justice

Ecological Wisdom

Non-violence

Decentralization

Community-based Economics

Feminism

Diversity

Responsibility

Future Focus

(We apologize to the Christian Right that “Chastity” is not among them.)

Yes, indeed, Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for V.P., is certainly babealicious! (One thing we know about McCain is that he has a keen eye for the ladies, as his first wife, who was an invalid when he cheated on her post-Vietnam, discovered long ago.) But what about slightly more pressing qualifications for Vice President, like intelligence, talent and knowledge of the world? We think McCain missed his big opportunity here. We believe that Big John chose the wrong Palin. He should have picked Michael Palin!

Michael Palin, Comedian, TV Writer, Filmmaker, World Traveler

Everybody, of course, remembers Michael Edward Palin, CBE, as perhaps the funniest member of that wonderful group of zanies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But he is much more than that! As the creator of an acclaimed series of travel documentaries, Oxford graduate Palin is truly a man of the world. Whereas Sarah Palin, like our current Fearless Leader, probably couldn’t find the Himalayas on a globe, this man has actually been there and made a mini-series about his experiences. Thus, he would have been uniquely qualified to bring both wit and gravitas to the GOP ticket – qualities that the Republicans need desperately. There’s also the sex-appeal factor: once voted the best-looking Python, Palin has had rapturous female fans literally faint in his arms. So Michael’s allure for female voters would have been at least as strong as working mother Sarah Palin’s could ever hope to be. Of course, there’s the awkward fact that Michael would have been constitutionally ineligible for the job, having gotten himself born in England, in some godforsaken place called Ranmoor in Yorkshire (wherever that is). But since when has either establishment party let a technicality like the Constitution get in its way? After all, not a single American war since 1945, including our current misadventure in Iraq, has been legally sanctioned by a formal Congressional Declaration of War, as Article One of the US Constitution requires. Compared to that violation, choosing a non-American as Vice President would be, as the Brits themselves say, “small beer.”

Also, in choosing the young, unfledged Governor of Alaska as his running mate, John McCain has proven yet again that he’s just another lying bastard politician. After swearing up and down that he would choose the smartest and best-experienced person for the job, to whom does he turn? A first-term Governor of a state incredibly remote from the centers of power. A woman whose most impressive pre-Gubernatorial experience (moose-hunting aside) is having served as mayor of a town so tiny it makes Cicely — the fictional small town of the TV series Northern Exposure — look like Chicago by comparison. A politician who actually asked, in a TV interview, “…what is it exactly that the VP does every day?” and then had to hear her interviewer patiently explain, “It’s a pretty big job, Madame Governor… You’d be surprised by how big the veep job is these days!” Since McCain, if elected, would be three years older than even Ronald Reagan was when he was elected, one would think that the problem of selecting the best person to stand “a heartbeat away” from the most powerful office in the world would be somewhat more pressing for him than the average candidate. But today no consideration – none – trumps the Machiavellian demands of power politics.

The big lesson of this electoral season, in fact, is that you can’t believe a word that comes out of any establishment candidate’s mouth. Consider the following:

Obama, after countering accusations of lack of experience with the unarguable claim that good judgment, such as voting against the Iraq War, trumps mere experience ever time, selects as his running mate the old war hawk (and hack) Smilin’ Joe Biden, who not only voted for the war, but served as chairman of a committee, in the run-up to the war, that held a “sham hearing,” refusing to call for testimony from dissenting voices like that of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and all but rubber-stamping Bush’s mad decision. (This crime is compounded by the fact that, as mentioned above, going to war was not even Bush’s decision to make, but Congress’.)

Hillary Rotten Clinton, after her unprecedented betrayal of her party in the primaries – when she bluntly declared that her “friend,” the Republican’s presumptive nominee, was more qualified to be president than her primary opponent – has now totally reversed herself, claiming that not only is Obama fully qualified to be president, but that McCain (who is still her “friend”) has become the “twin” of the utterly incompetent George W. Bush.

McCain and the Republicans, after fifteen years of vilifying Hillary Clinton as the devil’s spawn, for all the wrong reasons, now shed crocodile tears of sympathy over her supposedly heartless treatment at the hands of the Democrats. (The last time I checked she was beaten fair and square, probably because of her support for the war, though I guess we’re not supposed to mention that.) They are so sad about this, in fact, that they want to make it up to the women of America by nominating their own “strong feminist candidate” as V.P. – a smiling cipher whose political judgment is even more dubious than Clinton’s. The craven, lying mainstream media is already calling Governor Palin a “maverick,” though she’s more of a standard-issue Repug than even her running mate: both “pro-life” and pro-death penalty – what the Lord giveth, the State taketh away – and, of course, pro-Iraq War and anti-Iran, she even supports drilling in ANWR.

But who is the worst, most pathetic liar of all, worse than Clinton, Obama or even McCain? The American Voter, who constantly lies to himself/herself, in the crazy belief that all these professional liars will suddenly start telling the truth once they get into office.

Meanwhile, there is a presidential candidate who has consistently told the truth: Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. She was right about the Iraq War. She was right in her suspicions that Bush was warned about 9/11. She is right about universal healthcare. She is right about the government’s shameful treatment of Katrina victims. The definition of insanity is to make the same choice over and over again and expect a different result. This year, choose sanity. Vote Green!

In my previous post, I quoted the Green Party presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney, in her Denver speech at Recreate ’68, talking about how the Democratic Party leadership took impeachment off the table, despite the Bush Administration’s many crimes, even those “against Nature itself.” So the question of the day is, Is the Bush Administration, by its very existence, a crime against nature? If we recognize that human beings live in a delicate balance with the rest of the natural world, and that we are, at our peril, fatally upsetting that balance, we can say without question that George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney are the two biggest criminals against nature on the planet, in their slavish whoring (and warring) on behalf of Big Oil and their obscene raping of environmental legislation and enforcement for the benefit of their corporate buddies and the great god Profit. Future generations will surely curse their names.

But it must be remembered that this regime did not inaugurate the destruction of Planet Earth. That has been a bipartisan project for some time. And when we look at the Democratic nominee and the presumptive Republican nominee, and listen to their statements about energy, it’s not hard to see that they have, to a greater or lesser degree, every intention of carrying on the Bush criminal tradition. That is because both are beholden to the Profit god and neither will blaspheme against it by declaring that America should, instead of drilling for oil or building nuclear power plants or exploiting “clean” coal (whatever that is), rethink the whole issue, with the recognition that only by tapping sustainable energy sources will we make human survival possible in the long run.

So we need a Cynthia McKinney — who (like all Greens) does not accept corporate money, who sees the Profit god as a false idol, and who has focused all her energies solely on helping her countrymen and the whole planet survive — to tell the truth and to bring morality back into politics. Because what the politicians of the mainstream parties (both of them) are doing to us is far nastier than anything Monica did to that good ol’ boy, Bill Clinton.

Go Cynthia McKinney! She is practically the only politician to tell the truth, to speak against the destruction of our nation, even when perpetrated by the leadership of her own former party, the Democrats. Here she is at the Denver Democratic Convention, at the Recreate ’68 rally, showing that there are still great Americans with the courage to speak out.

“… and when the people, hurting from the financial mismanagement of this country, called for accountability for the crimes that have been committed against the people here, against the global community, against Nature itself, the Democratic leadership took Impeachment off the table!”

Both the mainstream media and Washington insiders professed astonishment at the departure of Karl Rove from the White House this week. This is very curious, since no one in the political world would have been surprised if he had announced his resignation in January or February. After all, he “lost” — or rather failed this time to steal — the 2006 election for the Republicans. In that election year, the Democrats proved themselves the equals of Rove in slimeballiness, promising their liberal base to end the war (a vow they never had any intention of fulfilling), while reaching out to the “center” (that is, the moderate Right) on other issues.

So it’s not Rove’s fall that surprises people, but its timing. And actually it’s not at all surprising to us, given what the White House is now contemplating. In fact, it makes perfect sense. But we’ll get back to that later, after we briefly summarize the implications of Rove’s vile career.

The Hack as Warrior

Rove had the dubious distinction, more than any other modern public figure, of making the concept of “politics as war” literal. His conviction that liberals in general and Democrats in particular were not merely misguided or wrong, but absolutely evil motivated his every move. His scorched earth strategies against the Dems (including two stolen Presidential elections) led many of his opponents to label him a political genius. This was, of course, entirely self-serving: if you allow yourself to lose time and time again without a fight, it’s tremendously soothing to your ego to imagine that the person you deem responsible for your defeat is some kind of mastermind.

To our shame, we, too, once bought into this bogus theory. For we’re now convinced that Rove’s reputation as an Evil Genius is (as he himself has often remarked) a myth. He was evil, but not at all a genius. Instead, he was a rather ordinary, though quite clever, fascist with a knack for perceiving the stupidity of his foes and exploiting it… and then covering his tracks.

The Elections That Fell Off the Truck

When it became clear that Bush had lost Florida to Gore in 2000, Rove (and Jim Baker, who had previously served as Dubya’s daddy’s “Rove”) took the risk that they could win anyway by running out the clock with legal maneuvering… and that the Dems so disliked Gore that they would not challenge the theft. With a little help from the Supreme Court, the gamble paid off. The lesser-known story is how he and his henchman pulled off much the same trick in 2004. When Green Party Presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik challenged the Ohio vote, they and their supporters uncovered a hotbed of election scandal: intimidation and deception, tampered machines, spoiled ballots and the ridiculously partisan Republican Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, the honorary co-chair of the Bush reelection committee.

Among the most tragic revelations was the fact that the GOP mob deliberately saw to it that polling places in minority (and traditionally strongly Democratic) neighborhoods in Ohio would lack sufficient voting machines to function effectively. This was de facto Jim Crow segregation. Fewer machines meant longer lines, making it impossible for many minority voters — many of whom had jobs to get to on Election Day — to stay long enough to cast their ballot.

Just before Election Day, Kerry’s people were boasting that, after having personally contacted virtually every Democratic voter in the state, there was no way they could lose Ohio, and I believe them. But, almost as if scripted, the cowardly Kerry caved. The candidate quickly conceded, and then refused to make any but the feeblest gestures to challenge the crime… and only under direct and relentless pressure from his betrayed supporters.

As in all such cases, Rove was somehow able to cover his ass: his campaign style was all over the Ohio fraud, but direct evidence of personal wrongdoing was lacking. However, he was the mastermind of the campaign, so if crimes were committed – even if he did not directly order them – he remains responsible. And what Rove has completely failed to perceive in the fervor of his Machiavellian machinations is that the party he so hates has by now become so nearly identical to his own that his scheming resembles nothing so much as a mad plot by Tweedledum to destroy Tweedledee.

The False Center

There’s been a curious reaction following Rove’s departure by some non-right-wing commentators to the effect that to despise Rove is somehow to become like Rove. Their bizarre conclusion is that to condemn such a hack demonstrates the same lack of civility that Rove and his supporters showed to their adversaries.

This is an excellent example of what I call “the false center” in American political discourse. There is a tendency in our political thought to distrust all extremes – even “extremes” of basic justice and honor — and cling to some safe middle ground, even if no such middle ground exists. The Founding Fathers did not flail about seeking some illusory compromise between the tyranny of a mad monarch and independence. Yet Americans crave so strongly the mellow “middle way” that it warps their ability to perceive what’s in front of their faces.

I would like to ask these commentators the following: “Did you like it when Southern bigots in the 1950s and 1960s did everything in their power to prevent blacks from exercising their rights as citizens to vote? So why can’t you see that what Rove did to black voters in Florida in 2000 and again in Ohio in 2004 was every bit as bad… no, worse, because of Rove’s closeness to the most powerful man in the land?” For in the last analysis, Rove’s crimes were not offenses against a political party, or even an ideology, but against the nation.

The Kingmaker is Dead, Long Live… Cheney?

So one would think that the departure of the man without whom Bush could never have seized the reigns of power would be cause for rejoicing for all progressives. But in fact Rove, awful as he was, represented the only effective counterforce to the real evil Emperor, Dick Cheney. For it’s been reported that, though Rove had been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Iraq War, he strongly opposes expanding the war into Iran. This is not as odd as it sounds. He was a big risk taker, yes, but he was not suicidal. He was smart enough to see that, the morality of another war aside (and he had seldom been deterred by such considerations), the Iranians, if attacked, possess retaliatory options Saddam lacked. For example, if the U.S. or Israel bombed Iran, the mullahs could block the Strait of Hormuz, through which, according to Wikipedia, approximately 40 percent of the world’s petroleum passes, thus precipitating a world economic crisis.

Pushing this war on Bush was left to someone so drunk with power (perhaps literally) and with the desire to serve his oil industry paymasters, that he could and would defy Reason itself. And ominously, virtually the first act of this Administration after Turd Blossom’s departure was to seek to declare Iran’s Republican Guard a terrorist organization, a clear provocation on the path to war. It’s not hard to guess Bush’s “thought” processes in this matter: “If Karl couldn’t even win a stinking election for me, what good is his foreign policy advice? I’m sticking with Cheney from now on.” (So much for Bush’s legendary loyalty to his friends.)

There are only two options left now to stop a new, far more destructive war: get Congress to cut off all funds to Bush’s war machine, or toss both him and Cheney out of office. Both are long shots, and both depend upon the diligence and courage of the citizenry, not the Democratic machine. We’ll keep you posted in future messages on this blog as to what actions you, dear citizen, can take to stop the madness.